Design

If You Can't Stand the Coding, Stay Out of the Kitchen: Three Chapters in the History of Home Automation

By Dag Spicer, August 12, 2000

For decades, futurists have been hanging out in America's kitchens, looking for problems to conquer with their computer solutions. Many have tried, yet none have ever quite delivered the recipe for success.

"A house is a machine for living in."
 Le Corbusier

As time passes, visions of the future ultimately face reality. In computer
history, the time scale of "yesterday's tomorrow's" takes place on the
exponential substrate of Moore's Law, giving predictions a half-life unknown
in almost any other field.

Despite this runaway avalanche of technique, cultural factors remain
remarkably constant across time. A particular cultural "meme" that seems
to never die is that of the American kitchen as a site where technology,
in the name of "increased leisure time," bumps its head against the real
world of driving kids to school, making dinner, and washing dishes. Here
are three of the stranger episodes in the history of computing where kitchens
and computers have collided.

Mrs. Sutherland's Kitchen

In 1966, Jim Sutherland, an engineer with the Westinghouse Corporation,
created the machine known as the "Electronic Computing Home Operator,"
or ECHO IV. [Figure 1] ECHO IV was a home automation system, hand-crafted
with surplus electronic parts and enclosed in oiled-walnut wooden cabinetry,
that computerized many of the household chores formerly undertaken by
Mrs. Sutherland.

Figure 1: "Electronic Computing Home Operator" was designed
and built by Westinghouse engineer Jim Sutherland in 1966.

The family finances were completed "automatically," and, according to
the April 1968 issue of Popular Mechanics, the Sutherlands were
extending the system to store recipes, compute shopping lists, track family
inventory, control home temperature, turn appliances on and off, and predict
the weather. One of the features Sutherland was most excited about was
ECHO's ability to act as a family message center, a place where people
could leave notes to each other. Not everyone was pleased: As the system
expanded to take over the family basement recreation room, Mrs. Sutherland
was heard to ask: "Will it replace me?"

Sutherland's idea found more public expression when, a year later, Neimann-Marcus
advertised the "Kitchen Computer," on the front page of its catalog for
1969. The Kitchen Computer was a $10,600 Honeywell minicomputer, in futuristic
packaging, designed to store recipes-presumably for the housewife who
had everything. One of the Kitchen Computer's main marketing claims was
that it could tell you what you could make with the ingredients you had
on hand, an attempt to digitize the kind of tacit knowledge that a good
cook learns from years of experience or family tradition. Such "de-skilling"
is a common feature of most forms of automation, an outcome suggested
even by the advertisement itself, which had the now-unimaginable tag line:
"If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." [Figure 2] As
far as is known, no Kitchen Computers were ever sold.

Culture Clash

The problem with the Kitchen Computer as a "convenience" was technical
as well as cultural. Technically, there was no means to input or output
characters, and interaction with the built-in recipe file was by front
panel switch. Even Honeywell's marketing literature shows an attached
Teletype, leaving one to wonder how much of a timesaver the Kitchen Computer
could really be. The purchase came with a two-week programming course
as well (in a language known as BACK), highlighting this deficiency and
making the product absurd from a consumer point of view.

Figure 2: Original advertisement for the Kitchen Computer: "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." Ouch.

Culturally, one must ask whether it was likely that anyone who could
afford to spend over $10,000-the price of a small suburban home in 1969-on
a device to store recipes would really be doing any cooking. With that
kind of budget, the solution would likely be a live-in chef or the traditional
3x5 card file, no?

This meme is still a potent driver of technology, or at least marketing.
Consider the announcement last year by Electrolux of an Internet Refrigerator,
the "Screenfridge." [Figure 3] Screenfridge is a machine that includes
a flat panel display in the door allowing family members to record and
play back messages to each other or to anyone outside their home via e-mail.
It also has a built-in web browser; a recipe engine that tells you what
you can cook with what you have in the fridge (sound familiar?); an integral
barcode scanner that will order more food for you over the Web and arrange
delivery; a built-in TV and radio; and connection to home security cameras.

In one significant way, the Screenfridge differs from the ECHO IV and
the Kitchen Computer. While these early attempts have a certain innocence
(or at least naivete), the Screenfridge reflects the more commodified
cultural landscape of the 21st century, and its marketing model is pure
Orwell, as the on-line brochure makes plain: "The price of the Screenfridge
will depend on several variables. When we go to market with this product
we may try non-traditional business models such as lowering the price
to consumers in return for displaying banners on their fridge doors."

The Illusion of Saved Labor

What deeper connections can we draw between these objects that span three
decades? First, there is a desire for control of the everyday processes
that frame our lives, something these machines embed in theory if not
in practice, of technology structuring a choreography of the mundane played
out via computers. We believe, or want to believe, in technology as a
simplifier of our lives, and in the face of contradictory evidence, we
adopt an ambivalent perspective rather then rejecting technology outright.
The more successful products seem to be the simplest, ones that make straightforward
claims and have obvious benefits (i.e., no required programming courses).

Second, these three examples reflect the profound qualitative shift
in computers that occurred in about the mid-1970s from machines that were
pure "number-crunchers" to devices that enable communication, visualization,
and entertainment. Electrolux explicitly notes that the refrigerator is
a central meeting place for any household; something every family member
interacts with on a daily basis and thus a 'natural' hub for the various
activities their fridge enables, precisely what Jim Sutherland said about
his ECHO IV. These reflect changes in what people thought computers could
be-and underline how Screenfridge lies within a tradition of which Sutherland's
ECHO IV and the Kitchen Computer form a part.

Figure 3: Electrolux Screenfridge, invented over thirty years
after the Kitchen Computer and the ECHO IV.

Finally, all three devices reveal a cultural desire for control in the
home, control that promises "increased leisure time" and similar life-enhancing
benefits, and whose realization or practicality become submerged in a
surface faith in technology. As homemakers long ago realized, claims of
increased leisure time are generally illusory.

Le Corbusier's comment at the beginning of this column suggests a model
for the home as something mechanical that supports human life. Whereas
once computers in the home stayed put, we can now expect a second qualitative
change, driven by the Web, to emerge within five years: a change to ubiquitous computing in
which the distinction between the home and its occupants becomes blurred.

How becoming ever more CPU-like is meant to be liberating (as inputs are
fed into us from every direction) is unclear. The level of interactivity
will be much more demanding, moving from quiescent devices that serve
when asked (e.g., a toaster) to interrupt-generating "intelligent" peripherals-cum-appliances
that demand user input. Rather than occupying several square feet, today's
kitchen computer might be built in to a cookbook; today's ECHO IV runs
on a PC with an X-10 (or similar) home interface adapter; and today's
more upscale homes already come pre-wired with networking and low voltage
DC control infrastructures. Prospective homebuyers will soon be asking:
"How long does it take to master this place's API?"

As Upside magazine recently noted about Larry Ellison's home,
you know you've really arrived when your house has its own Chief Information
Officer.

The Kitchen Computer and the ECHO IV form part of The Computer Museum
History Center's permanent collection.

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